In recent decades, cities have faced great challenges: the rapid expansion of the population, aging infrastructure, and the growing demand for more efficient and sustainable services. Conventional urban management, which relies on reactive decisions, is no longer sufficient to meet these increasingly demanding needs.

Urban management based on failure fixes, intuition, and disconnected systems is a thing of the past. Traditional methods such as using Excel and static systems do not work. We need advanced tools that provide us with valuable information, show us clear metrics, and help to detect bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Nowadays, it is crucial to have good data governance to maintain operational and strategic control of our cities. And this is where Digital Twins come into play.

Smart cities emerge as an innovative solution, integrating advanced technologies to improve the quality of life for citizens and optimize urban resources. Among these technologies, digital twins stand out for their ability to virtually replicate urban environments, integrate real-time data, and simulate scenarios. In this blog, we will explore how to digitize a city for the transition to a smart city, the technologies involved in a smart city, what steps to follow for efficient urban planning using digital twins, and the best tools to carry out this management.

Key Technologies to Transform Your City into a Smart City

For the digital transition of a traditional city towards an intelligent, sustainable, and efficient urban model, we need to integrate innovative analytics technologies and solutions centered on citizens. Here are the most important ones:

• Internet of Things (IoT): IoT devices such as sensors and actuators collect real-time data. This data is stored in the cloud, allowing monitoring and analyzing aspects such as public transport, traffic, energy consumption, environmental impact, and the state of infrastructures. IoT facilitates continuous monitoring and a quick response to events and problems.

• Big Data: Allows managing large amounts of data in an orderly and efficient manner, using cloud services such as Azure or AWS.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analysis: AI analyzes and processes the collected data to detect patterns, anticipating problems such as traffic jams. This helps to optimize logistics routes and promotes sustainable mobility.

• Advanced Communication Networks (5G): 5G connectivity provides high speed and low latency, two essential features for transmitting data from sensors distributed at various points in the city. This allows knowing the status of the monitored perimeter at all times and providing immediate responses to events.

• Urban management platforms: These digital tools allow centralizing and managing data from diverse sources, analyzing them, and helping to improve public services.

• They promote informed decision-making and are essential for interoperability in smart cities.

• Geographic Information Systems (GIS): Provides geolocated data on the location of sensors, traffic flows, and the status of urban assets such as streetlights, water networks, and traffic lights, visually assisting in developing more efficient and informed urban development plans.

These technologies lay the operational foundation of smart cities and enable the transition from a traditional urban model to a digitized, intelligent, and efficient one.

How to Create an Intelligent Urban Development Plan (Practical Guide)

An urban development plan in a smart city is an integrated strategy that guides the digital transformation of a traditional city. This process involves integrating digital technologies, data analysis, and innovative solutions into the planning and management of services, to improve their quality, increase sustainability, resilience, and focus on citizens.

1. Diagnosis and strategic analysis of the territory: A thorough evaluation of the current state of the territory is conducted, covering social, economic, environmental aspects and the degree of digitalization of urban services. This step identifies needs and opportunities through participatory processes that actively involve citizens.

2. Definition of objectives: After the diagnosis, intelligent or SMART objectives are established that are: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

3. Design of the roadmap and planning of actions: A detailed plan is developed that includes the necessary actions to achieve the previously set objectives. It should precisely define the phases of the project, actions to be executed, those responsible, deadlines, and necessary resources, and its level of detail will be proportional to the digitalization of the city.

4. Implementation of technological solutions: In this phase, the key technologies for intelligent urban management are selected and implemented. The implementation must be aligned with the objectives and include scalable solutions such as advanced visualization environments and predictive analytics capabilities. Additionally, it is essential that these platforms ensure interoperability between different systems to avoid information silos.

5. Governance and collaborative management: Urban transformation is not just technological; it also requires a solid governance model that effectively coordinates the different participants, their responsibilities, facilitates decision-making, and ensures transparency in data management and encourages citizen participation.

6. Continuous monitoring and evaluation: Finally, real-time monitoring and analysis systems must be implemented that allow evaluating the performance of urban assets. This monitoring should be based on reliable and updated data, and will serve to identify deviations, detect bottlenecks, anticipate inefficiencies, and understand their causes to correct them.

Digital Twins for Control and Supervision of Smart Cities

As mentioned earlier, digital twin platforms are positioned as one of the most disruptive technologies for smart city management. They are a technology that adapts to different sectors by creating virtual replicas of plants, buildings, services, machines and specific objects. In the context of smart cities, it allows virtually replicating from specific areas to entire cities. The information can also be visualized by layer, at the map level for comprehensive monitoring, or even by areas for a detailed and immersive 3D experience.

Digital twins allow integrating real-time data from various sources and protocols such as MQTT, SQL, SCADA, ERPs, but they can also connect directly to the data sources of urban assets and services. Some possibilities include monitoring and analyzing water networks and electrical networks, energy stations, public lighting, mobility infrastructures, and waste management.

By monitoring in real time the state and functioning of urban assets, anticipating problems, and planning maintenance more efficiently, it allows optimizing resource use and significantly reducing operational costs.

Best Tools for Comprehensive Planning and Management of a Smart City

Urban planning is increasingly advancing in the use of innovative technologies, and with that, the platforms are becoming more varied. Some focus on comprehensive monitoring through data, others facilitate redesign through artificial intelligence, and others specialize in deeply analyzing and solving more specific problems. Below we will show some of the most powerful tools for urban planning and management:

• Flypix.ai: A geospatial analysis platform that uses artificial intelligence to transform aerial and satellite images into actionable information. It allows users from various sectors to train custom AI models to detect objects, monitor changes, and analyze anomalies in geospatial data.

• UrbanistaAI: It is a participatory planning platform that employs generative artificial intelligence to co-design the future of cities. It facilitates collaboration between citizens, urban planners, and authorities, allowing visualization and evaluation of urban proposals interactively.

• UrbanFootPrint: It is an urban intelligence platform that integrates and organizes geospatial data related to the built environment, communities, and climate risks. It helps understand and mitigate risks in infrastructure, mobility, public services, and sustainability.

• UrbView: An artificial intelligence platform for the management of smart cities focused on the safety of urban environments and effectively reducing crime and harassment rates.

• TOKII: It is a digital twin platform with AI that allows comprehensive monitoring of cities, enabling connection to any data source. It enables predictions with No-Code technology and facilitates predictive maintenance.

  
  

The information presented in the comparative table is merely indicative and has been compiled from publicly available information on the official websites of each tool. Since digital platforms are constantly evolving, it is possible that some functionalities have changed. It is recommended that readers verify updated information directly with the providers of each platform.

It should be noted that each platform specializes in different areas within smart cities. Therefore, the benefits that each will bring will depend on the objectives that have been established and the type of monitoring that is desired. The choice of the right tool should be based on the needs of the projects identified in the urban plan development.

The digital transformation of a traditional city is not a matter of implementing modern technologies without first conducting a study on its needs and strategic planning to address them. A successful implementation requires an understanding of urban challenges and a coherent integration of technological solutions that respond to the real needs of the sector.